What if you could shape your dreams? What if you could point your nightmares in a happier direction and find relief from the distress?
No, it’s not science fiction; it’s a real subject of research—one that fascinates Michelle Carr, a newly appointed assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Addiction at Université de Montréal.
Carr is interested in what she calls “dream engineering,” the use of techniques and technologies to influence dreams for therapeutic purposes.
Raised and educated in the state of New York, she developed an early interest in the power of dreams and their sometimes pernicious hold on the mind, something she experienced herself.
She remembers having frequent lucid dreams—a state in which the dreamer realizes they are dreaming—as well as frequent nightmares and occasional sleep paralysis, a state between sleep and wakefulness whre she couldn't move and had frightening hallucinations.
A transformative experience
One night, while at university, she had a lucid dream immediately after an episode of sleep paralysis. It was a transformative experience.
“I had been in the grip of a terrifying paralysis, and then I fell back into a deep sleep and knew that I was asleep, that I was dreaming,” she recalled. “It was an incredible sensation to feel I was inside my mind. And from that moment on, I was able to overcome almost all my sleep paralysis nightmares by using lucid dreaming.”
Armed with a new sense of agency and feeling less fear, Carr continued her studies in psychology and neuroscience. She then decided to head north and pursue a Ph.D. in Canada, in the dreams-and-nightmares lab of Tore André Nielsen, a professor in UdeM's Department of Psychiatry and Addiction. She went on to do two post-docs at sleep labs in the U.K. and the U.S.
In the course of her post-doctoral studies, Carr found it was possible to influence the content of dreams.
One way to do it, she said, is to use your waking imagination, i.e. to train yourself to repeatedly visualize the desired outcome of the problematic dream. She added that almost any sensory stimulus—sound, light, smell—can modify the sleep experience.
It is also possible to combine these two approaches: during cognitive training, a beep is played to create an association with a positive dream. Then, when the beep is heard while asleep, it serves as a cue or reminder to modify the outcome of the dream.
'Stay calm, be curious'
“Dreams are influenced by us, by what we are feeling,” said Carr.
“If a dream frightens you, it becomes even more terrifying, but if you can stay calm, be curious and the dream will respond positively. Studies are increasingly showing that it is possible to connect the sleeping body with the dreaming mind.”
Carr is interested in applying this emerging field of dream engineering to psychiatry, since people with certain mental disorders have very specific dreams that can affect their well-being and recovery.
For example, people trying to kick a drug habit will frequently dream about using drugs. These dreams cause distress and increase their risk of relapse. Similarly, people with psychotic disorders may have dreams that increase their hallucinatory symptoms on awakening, and people suffering from PTSD often have intrusive nightmares.
“For these psychiatric cases, we believe that directly treating the dreams and nightmares can lessen the severity of symptoms and improve people's quality of life,” Carr said.
But this is still an emerging science. We need to carry out clinical trials and work closely with psychiatrists before we can hope to implement these types of interventions.”
That is precisely what Carr plans to do in her new position at Université de Montréal, an institution that, she said, has “quite unique expertise in dream science.”
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